Just over a year ago (April 1, 2009, as it happens) I made my first post in what was to become a bit of an ongoing series – the ShooTag saga. Had Melissa Rogers, one of the CEOs of ShooTag, refrained from calling me ignorant at that time, and had not attempted to air her preposterous faux scientific notions on my blog, my interest in the dubious ShooTag might have blown away in the wind like so many other tumbleweeds of pseudoscience that have rolled my way. That wrong step by the ShooTaggers was just the first of many that has kept them in the focus of my attention and led us to this moment, which I think you will agree when you get to the end of this post, is a defining one for the credibility of this product and its makers.

When I first visited the ShooTag site, my main attention was, of course, on the science that was claimed to be behind this remarkable gadget, and, to that end, one of my first stops was the ShooTag Science page. It was immediately obvious that the scientific sounding language that was used there was utter waffle.(i)

The page also featured a link to a report called ‘Subtle Magnetic Repulsion of Insect Pests’ by someone called Professor William Nelson, which allegedly appeared in a periodical called The Quantum Agriculture Journal. It took me a scant second to establish that The Quantum Agriculture Journal didn’t exist [Note: See update at the bottom of this post]. The linked paper was an incoherent ramble through Chaos Theory Lite, MRI mechanics, the electro-sensitivity of sharks and the effects of magnetism on cell cultures – much of it inaccurate, most of it contextually adrift and the sum of it an addled mess of gee-whiz pop-science ideas that would be at home in a bad science fiction movie. [See more about this, also, below.]

Unsurprisingly, this link was also rapidly removed from the ShooTag site after my post, along with all references to the Quantum Agriculture Journal and Professor William Nelson. You can still see the original full text here though, complete with reference(ii) to ‘The Quantum Agriculture Journal’ edited by Prof. William Nelson for IMUNE.(iii)

At the time I thought that the reason for these excisions was simply that the ShooTaggers didn’t like being sprung for their silly science. Fair enough – it does make them look pretty incoherent. However. Our recent investigations into the magnetic strips on the ShooTags prompted me to re-examine some of the scientific claims made for the gadgets, in particular, the notion of the ‘trivector electromagnetic signature’ that seems to be of such importance in the ShooTag promotional literature.

So I plugged that phrase into Google. The very first result throws up a link to a pdf of a document called ‘QUANTUM ELECTRO DYNAMICS and The VOLT-AMMETRIC TRIVECTOR SIGNATURE For DUMMIES’ by William Nelson MD Prof of Medicine IMUNE.

The pdf is a disjointed mish-mash of misunderstood science and erroneous analogies all whirled up into ball of unfathomable conclusions. It sounds, in fact, not unlike the incomprehensible babblings of a certain Dr Werner.

And there he is again. That Professor William Nelson guy.

Now, we’ve had cause to mention him before here on The Cow, but only in passing reference to the ShooTag scam. I think it’s time we turned the magnifying glass onto Professor William Nelson himself.

Here is a clip of him ‘explaining the trivector':

Whoa. That was even more incomprehensible than the pdf we just looked at.(iv)

Researching Dr Nelson isn’t hard. There are literally thousands of references to him across the net. These are just some of the things that have been claimed of him (mostly by himself):(v)(vi)(vii)(viii)

As well as the comprehensive reference links I’ve added above, you can read Professor William Nelson’s personal Curriculum Vitae here, courtesy of the Seattle Times. (Note that he tones down the more egregious exaggerations when writing in his own hand, and adds the caveat that ‘Whatever Dr Nelson says about himself can be relied on as true. Information that is not direct from Dr Nelson may be distorted’. O-k-a-y. Very convenient. And not that he bothers to correct any of this ‘distorted’ information anywhere, as far as I’m able to determine. To the contrary, as we shall see, he has a ‘friend’ who is very happy to take it one step further still…)

Depending how far you want to trawl and how much time you want to waste, you can find all kinds of other accomplishments for Dr/Prof Nelson. Needless to say, most of them can be established pretty quickly to be false. He (or anybody else) simply can’t know if he has ever been nominated for a Nobel Prize because Nobel Prize nominees aren’t advised they’ve been nominated and all nominations are kept secret for 50 years. So unless his Nobel Prize nomination was made when he was 10 or younger, that’s just plain rubbish.(xii) NASA explicitly denies(xiii) having any involvement with a Professor William Nelson and it is possible that he is hoping to dupe people into mistaking him for Clarence William ‘Bill’ Nelson – a NASA mission payload specialist of some achievement.(xiv) And, investigation into ‘Professor’ Nelson’s degrees reveals that they all come from dubious unaccredited institutions and mail-order or online courses. He is certainly not a quantum physicist.

There is no shadow of a doubt that Professor William Nelson is not the man he paints himself to be. Indeed, sometimes the man Professor William Nelson paints himself to be is actually a woman. A woman who goes by the name of Desiré Dubounet. It turns out that William Nelson is a gender switcher.

Now, I want to say right off the bat that when it comes to gender identification and sexual preferences and fantasies, I’m fairly open-minded. There’s a pretty big sliding scale with sexuality as far as I’m concerned, and as long people don’t do it in the streets and frighten the horses, I really don’t care. William Nelson’s right to be Desiré Dubounet is unassailable in my book, but his right to cheat, lie and swindle people out of good medical care is what I have in my sights here. To that end, I present a clip of Desiré Dubounet that is as frightening for its dreadful taste as it is for its demonstration of William Nelson’s mental state (WARNING – this is NSFW. It contains torrents of venomous bad language and it is quite surprising that it is still up on YouTube):

That’s a deeply troubled person by any reckoning. And Desiré Dubounet is not at all shy about promoting her ‘accomplishments’, either, be it for herself or for William Nelson. This from the Desiré Dubounet website:

Desiré is by far the most colourful, interesting, intelligent and courageous person in the world today… Nobody has changed the world as much as Desiré. Desiré as a super intelligent child was the first to max several intelligence tests, she was able to save the Apollo 13 astronauts, and has developed several patents that have revolutionized life.(xv)

As we’ve seen in the video above, like a good many of the peddlers of pseudoscience, William Nelson/Desiré Dubounet portrays herself as being ‘persecuted’ for her beliefs. Claiming to have switched gender to ‘prevent the powers-that-be’ from killing her’ she makes her pseudoscience cause corporeal by dressing it up in a gender issue; that way, if her ideas are criticized she can make the accusation that it is her person that is being persecuted and that she is being witch-hunted by those who are intolerant of her human rights.(xvi)

The truth of the matter is that in 1996(xvii) William Nelson fled his home in the USA to take up residence in Budapest because he has been indicted by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on nine counts of felony fraud charges in relation to various ‘bioenergetic’ healing devices sold through his companies. These expensive (and needless to say completely bogus) devices, which are claimed to be effective for the treatment of all manner of ailments including debilitating diseases such as AIDS and cancer, have been implicated in the deaths of several severely ill people in the United States, and are responsible for the lengthening of the illnesses of numerous others. This is a monstrously repellent scam and William Nelson has made millions of dollars out of it. Consequently he lives extravagantly in a restored five story building in Budapest with his personal staff of about a dozen, including a cook, hairdresser, nanny, security guards and chauffeurs. He uses his money to make terrible movies,(xviii)even worse music, and run his nightclub Bohemian Alibi, among other things.(xix)

William Nelson’s network for the sale of his machines (which go variously under the names EPFX, SCIO and QXCI) is widespread. He uses chiropractors, homeopaths, physicians, nurses and volunteers to sell the machines worldwide and there is no question that he knows that they do nothing at all (the disclaimer on the QXCI site says, in part ‘No claims are made of the system or of its results.’ which, in anybody’s language, is the ultimate ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ card).

And the ‘scientific’ basis for these completely fraudulent, dangerous(xx) devices is the ‘trivector electromagnetic’ principle that Nelson promotes.

Which brings us, I believe, right back to ShooTag. As we have seen, Melissa Rogers and Kathy Heiney were at first very happy to invoke Professor William Nelson’s name when it suited their purpose(xxi) and are still flaunting the ‘trivector electromagnetic’ principles behind their device. It seems to me very likely that Kathy Heiney, in her ‘training’ as a ‘Quantum Biofeedback Technician and Stress Management Specialist‘ could have come across the work of William Nelson. So, no real coincidence there. But now an obvious question arises: Is there any really tangible link between Professor William Nelson and ShooTag, Melissa Rogers and Kathy Heiney? Let’s see what a quick search brings up…

The link is protected with a login, but Google can see it, so it should be there… somewhere… Aha! Some further detective work from Dewi (who you will recall was our chief decoder of the data on the ShooTags a few posts back) reveals the complete schedule for the QX World Conference in Budapest, part of which features:

And the pieces of the puzzle all fall resoundingly into place. The QX World Conference is an event that has, over the last few years, been held annually in Budapest by William Nelson/Desiré Dubounet. At this conference, Nelson assembles the faithful from his Quantum Bioenergetic flock, and here they presumably shore up each others’ belief systems, trade war stories and have an opportunity to touch the hem of the Master’s (Mistresses?) garment. From this snippet of information we can deduce that Melissa Rogers and Kathy Heiney were there, were sheduled to be there, or at the very least were represented there in some way.(xxiii) However you cut it, a visceral, and certainly not insubstantial link with the fraudulent, criminally culpable William Nelson is established.

Now, I will quickly add that the act of associating with a criminal does not make you yourself a criminal. It can in no way be construed that the Shoo!TAG sisters are involved with the felony fraud committed by William Nelson. But the inference is written plain – William Nelson is wanted for fraud by the FDA because the ideas behind his gadgets have no scientific substance and are, through their complete lack of efficacy, misleading and liable to cause harm. Melissa Rogers and Kathy Heiney, by all the available evidence, advocate those exact same pseudoscientific ideas for their Shoo!TAG products.

No wonder they were so quick to divest themselves of any relationship to Nelson. Once they realised that they simply didn’t need to have the endorsement of a nutty ‘professor’ like Nelson to get their product to sell, they ditched all reference to him quick smart.

The credentials of Shoo!TAG can no longer be in any doubt. With absolutely no scientific evidence to back up their claims, a product that is revealed to be nothing more than a stock-standard magnetic swipe card, some third party testing that demonstrates clearly the complete ineffectiveness of the tags, and an indisputable link to the unsubstantiated irrational beliefs of a person who is a fraud and a swindler wanted by the FDA, it is more than clear that Melissa Rogers and Kathy Heiney are ripping off pet owners wherever they have managed to get their silly product into a retail outlet. Worse, by encouraging the use of their product for humans, they are putting the lives of people at risk.

I consider that what we have here, then, on the matter of the Shoo!TAG’s bona fides, is an emphatic QED.

[UPDATE] – Dewi points out that something calling itself the Quantum Agriculture Journal does indeed exist as a one-off document in exe format. I want to make it very clear that the Quantum Agriculture Journal did not have any web presence at the time I searched for it originally – and I was extremely thorough. All available references to it at the time pointed back to the ShooTag site. I did some further searching and turned up another online version of the ‘scientific’ paper (attributed to Professor William Nelson) that was purportedly carried by the QAJ (and originally linked to the ShooTag site). You can read the complete paper here. (This, also, has been removed from the web as of April 2010).

This is what I said of it in my original ShooTag post:

The ’scientific’ document itself (if you can be bothered) is a hare-brained ramble through a whole mess of abracadabra, beginning with some descriptions of chaotic attractors, jumping through magnetic resonance imaging and the electrical sensitivity of sharks, and ending up with the conductivity of chemicals in cells. It’s the most meaningless agglomeration of waffle that I’ve attempted to read in a very long while. If you’ve ever even seen a scientific paper, you know this ain’t one of those.

In light of recent comments by the ShooTaggers, though, it does have some interesting points. The ‘paper’ says that:

‘This three dimensional or trivector signature has been imprinted onto the magnetic field of a three-field magnetic memory card. This card is then hung around the neck of an animal and the magnetic field can stimulate the biology of the animal to build up defense to invaders.This is completely safe and proficient. In our preliminary farm tests the researchers found 75% less infestation of the insect pests when using the pests than in control populations. Further testing is presently being done in Europe.’

These words have been spoken in larger or smaller part by promoters of ShooTag at various times over the last year. It establishes quite clearly that they are using the exact same pseudoscience which underpins William Nelson’s fraudulent medical devices.

This is the ‘scientific explanation’ originally offered on the ShooTag Science page:

All things are composed of atoms that are mostly electrons and protons. In between the electrons and protons and in between the atoms is mostly empty space, filled with magnetic static, quantum and gravitational fields. The science of voltammetry tells us of the electrical principles of all biological entities. Our research has shown that subtle inductance/capacitance fields (magnetic and static) can have dramatic effects on biology.

The only true measurement in electricity is the voltage and amperage, everything else is a mathematical variation of the two. These calculations are referred to as virtual or mathematical measures. Variations in flow of amperage and voltage give us a way to measure capacitance, inductance and frequency. These measurements reflect the static and magnetic effects of bio-electricity.

This is straight out of the textbook of Professor William Nelson, without a shadow of a doubt. [↩]

This reference has also been removed since I wrote this post. Only problem for them is that this time I anticipated that there was a very high likelihood of that happening, so I archived the site as it appeared on April 24, 2010. Compare that with the site as it appears today (January 27, 2011). Is there any more damning proof that the ShooTaggers are desperate to distance themselves from Professor William Nelson? Is this the behaviour of honest people who truly believe in what they sell? [↩]

A search for IMUNE shows it to be another of William Nelson’s projects; it features references to a course in ‘Quantum BioFeedback’ featuring instruction in EPFX, SCIO and QXCI devices. So this ‘reference’ is to a an article in a non-existent journal attached to a website belonging to the person who supposedly wrote the article. Do I need to point out the fraudulent nature of that circuitous process? [↩]

I could really rip this apart if I could be bothered, but honestly, it’s just one dumb concept warped into another dumb concept mashed into another dumb concept for its entire length. There’s no point even trying to attack all the daft pieces of it because the whole thing is just utter nonsense. [↩]

This really means nothing at all, even if it’s true – the Mensa tests don’t screen for lack of rational or logical thinking. You can still solve puzzles and be dissociated from a rational thought process [↩]

Digging deeper we can find evidence that maybe William Nelson worked in a minor capacity for a company that worked for NASA. That’s not the same as ‘working for NASA’ and certainly not the same as ‘saving the lives of the Apollo 13 crew’. [↩]

Omniscience – The narcissist often pretends to know everything, in every field of human knowledge and endeavour. He lies and prevaricates to avoid the exposure of his ignorance. He resorts to numerous subterfuges to support his God-like omniscience. Where his knowledge fails him – he feigns authority, fakes superiority, quotes from non-existent sources, embeds threads of truth in a canvass of falsehoods. He transforms himself into an artist of intellectual prestidigitation. Many narcissists are avowed autodidacts, unwilling to subject their knowledge and insights to peer scrutiny, or, for that matter, to any scrutiny. The narcissist keeps re-inventing himself, adding new fields of knowledge as he goes. This creeping intellectual annexation is a round about way of reverting to his erstwhile image as the erudite ‘Renaissance man’.

And she does do this, there is no question about that. There are numerous instances of this tactic in her writings and in the many online videos. [↩]

Or 1998 – like everything about William Nelson, the actual facts seem variable [↩]

Hollywood is not interested in his movies because they have been ‘pressured by the drug companies’ to avoid dealing with him. It has nothing to do with them being so bad as to be laughable. [↩]

Just an aside: if you thought the trolling by the various ShooTag supporters was bad, you should see how the supporters of William Nelson behave. It is very interesting to me that the tone of the commentary that I’ve read across various sites that have criticized Nelson is eerily similar to the way the ShooTaggers express themselves. I fully expect we’ll get trolled by both camps for this post. [↩]

Bill/Desiré holds the same fascination for me as a Dan Brown novel. Those are awesome: they’re the only books I read with a pencil in hand to mark all the factual errors and logical fallacies in the margin of the book.

So it is with Prof B.

That journal: might want to edit the post, since it DOES exist, albeit in the loosest possible sense. This exe file contains it. [Beware, do not run the exe, just uncompress it with 7zip or such. Don’t trust exes from people who believe homeopathy can prevent viruses.] The journal, like all others I’ve looked at in that folder, was a one-shot, written and edited by Bill, for his own company, with no peer review. So, exactly the opposite of what most people mean when they say “published in a science journal”.

File sizes are large (that journal is 325Mb), but download speeds are good (getting 675kb/s). If I had the space, I’d download all these “journals” just for future reference.

Those ten movies… her IMDB page doesn’t support the claim. However, there are scenes in the YouTube clips above that are from movies not listed on IMDB. So, court remains out on that one.

That page claims “at fifteen, attained a perfect score in intelligence testing.” – there’s no such thing as a “perfect score” in an IQ test. If he got no answers wrong in the test, it just means he was taking the wrong test. Like someone in the bottom class at maths, taking a paper that can give a grade between F and C: if they get full marks, that tells you nothing about whether they should get an A or a C. Instead, they should be retested with a paper that has a higher range.

“He was posted in his local newspaper as the boy with the “Ultimate IQ”.” – this may be verifiable: he was Born and raised in Ohio (Warren, 19th June 1951). So the libraries in Warren, Ohio, may be able to confirm this. He’s really, REALLY good at self-promotion, so I would not be surprised to find such an article.

[For some reason (we can only speculate…) this reply got flagged as spam, so my comments below were made before I read it – The Reverend]

Looked at the journal some more. it shills a pesticide “Botangro”. It’s not just stuff written by Nelson, there are also photocopies of stuff from real journals (with the journal names still on the top of the page, like “SOIL SCI SOC AM J Vol 36 January-February 1992″).

The journal is a PDF of scanned images of pages that were apparently once ring-bound.

He doesn’t mention “tri-vectors” but even back then we see him applying voltages across substances and taking multimeter measurements as if it gave quantitative information about the “goodness” of the thing. He makes no effort to explain why he thinks that how conductive a fertiliser is governs how good it is at fertilising.

At one point he claims his fertiliser has a negative voltage across it, inadvertently making it an over-unity machine as well as a fertiliser, but I’m guessing he just had the meter connected the wrong way round and didn’t notice.

There’s nothing in the PDF at all that relates to the Shoo!Tag product, that I can see. Nothing about frequencies or anything like that.

That one’s just advertising fluff, though: it spends the first 10 pages saying that some animals can sense magnetism. Then on the last page, it says shootag uses magnetism to work, it links to some stuff that doesn’t mention pests at all, and that’s about it.

Honestly, while the Shoo!Taggers claim(ed) to be inspired by his work, I don’t see the connection they think is there. He never claims pests are affected: only bodies. None of his stuff they’ve ever linked to supports their claim that his stuff can scare off pests.

As well as 300+Mb of unrelated video to pad out the “journal”, I found that imune.org is “accredited” by imeasure – a domain registered in Hungary, on cheap shared hosting in the states.

“The IMEAS (International Medical Education Accreditation Service)
hereby grants full accreditation to all courses, degrees and licenses provided, distributed or in ant[sic] fashion awarded by the International Medical University
of Natural Education hence referred to as IMUNE.
This will certify that the International Medical Education Accreditation Service has dully[sic] investigated the staff and curriculum of the International Medical Education Accreditation Service[eh?] and has found it to be adequate for accreditation by International law.
The International Medical Education
Accreditation Service
This certificate can be displayed for public notice of the approval and endorsement of the IMEAS company in assessing the educational institution of International Medical Education Accreditation Service[eh?].”

Looks like he is having a hard time telling his different stock companies apart :) I think it MEANT to say the IMEAS was accrediting IMUNE. I do love “dully” as a typo though.

Apparently Desiré claims a span of ten octaves. I’m not sure her YouTube performances span even one, nor whether she manages to hit any of the right notes, but I’m no musician. Wikipedia suggests more than five is unlikely, though.

I think that the connection to Nelson’s ideas that the ShooTaggers make is likely to be hard to fathom. They are unable to express themselves with any level of logic whenever I’ve engaged them, so I suppose to them it’s all just ‘frequencies & quantum & magnetism & stuff’. There is no doubt that they are, or were at some time, in cahoots with Nelson – the Subtle Magnetic Repulsion paper totally substantiates this link. It explicitly mentions ‘the Shoo! technology’ and uses language that the ShooTaggers have quoted word for word on numerous occasions.

I reckon he was happy to accept credit for their woo, but it’s not something he came up with, and it doesn’t really seem to be building on his work, and it had nothing at all to do with his journal. Completely different flavour of woo, apart from the word “trivector”.

My guess is they tried to put themselves under his umbrella, in the hope it’d give them more exposure and apparent respectability, but they dropped the idea when they realised what a poisoned chalice he was.

Even supposing the ‘flavour’ is different, it’s certainly in the same ice-cream parlour. And all the ‘quantum electro-hooey’ stuff is scooped from the same pail.

Whatever the case, my challenge to Melissa Rogers and Kathy Heiney remains: if there is science behind Shoo!TAG, let’s see it. If it’s not the kind of thing that William Nelson advocates, then doubly so – ante up so we can see the cloth that it’s cut from.

My experience with ‘woo woo water’ involved a salesman at our local Home Depot. He was touting the benefits of the system, and as proof, offered the measurements from his proprietary stuff-o-meter. It measured all the stuff in the water – whatever that stuff consisted of was not explained.

I wrote about it on CycleDog and for a very long time, that post received the greatest number of hits. It was weird. And the comments have a Stepford Wives characteristic that’s downright creepy.

Universal Head: If you bother to go to the QXConference site you can see that there is something of a ‘cultish’ feel to it – especially in the photographs of past conferences. Nelson/Dubounet seems right at home in the limelight of his fans.

King Willy: The ShooTaggers would now be wise to cut their losses, accept that their product is going to get busted sooner or later (people can be fooled, but only for so long), and retire on their ill-gotten gains. It would be the sensible course of action, but I have a feeling that they’re going to ride this bronco right off a cliff.

Dewi: Thanks for your corrections. I originally searched very thoroughly for the QAJ but I couldn’t turn up any references to it anywhere. I appreciate your further detective work. What I say about it originally not being available as an active link on the ShooTag site still stands – it never worked. I’ve amended the post to reflect the newest findings. I’ve also turned up an online version of the ‘scientific’ paper that was purportedly in the QAJ. Link above.

As far as downloading the QAJ exe is concerned, well, perhaps I will, but I don’t really relish the thought of wading through more interminable claptrap by William Nelson. Plus I’d rather use my (expensive) bandwidth on something more entertaining… OTOH… it may give us the frequency information we’re looking for… dang. I suspect though, that it will just contain the pdf I’ve linked above.

As for the ‘Ultimate IQ’ claim – I wouldn’t be surprised to find Mr Nelson has been practising teh spin since he was a toddler. He’s certainly developed it into quite a skill.

Ed W: Hi and good to see you here at The Cow! I’m interested in the post you speak about – can you give us a direct link? (I looked through your site but couldn’t see a Search option). You might be interested in some of the ‘water’ woo we’ve examined here on The Cow – just click on the Woo category to the right there and you’ll find several posts.

Ed W: Yes, no doubt about it – spammed by the anti-fluoride brigade for sure. As near as I can tell the Zero water device is just another gadget in a long line of simple purification gadgets that are supposed to have ‘magical’ effects on water. It’s possibly some kind of pyramid selling scheme too – the advocates remain active because that’s the way they keep the money flowing. I guess we can thank the SpagMonster that the ShooTaggers haven’t adopted that strategy (yet!)

Queen Willy: I don’t think I can be ‘Sir Reverend’ can I?

Joey: Yeah – funny that. But we shouldn’t be surprised that she’s a legal genius – she’s a genius at everything else!

I just watched the video of the “test” of the shootag for people, and was appalled. Apparently, Dr. Fink has no knowledge of scientific method, or was paid to ignore it. No scientist would allow the subjects of a test to know whether the device (medication, etc.) they were given was functional or a placebo prior to execution of the test. In fact, for the test to be proper, the test administrator should not know, either. I’m sure everyone reading this knows that the test is invalid, and was bound to be, since the device itself is bogus.

I can’t help wondering if this is the kind of ‘science’ Dr. Fink teaches his students. I also wonder if Texas A&M is aware of his participation in such quackery.

I’m inclined to think that Dr Fink’s main crime is that he is predisposed to an unfounded ‘belief’ in the claims of the ShooTag people. This is surprising for someone calling themselves a scientist. If you look at his actual findings, though, you will see that despite his predisposition, he comes up with the correct analysis of the experiment, that is, the data produced is equivocal and inconclusive, and that other experiments are required. So, even if he thinks the thing works, he’s not been able to offer any actual evidence that it does.